I was reading the paper yesterday and was interested to see one of the columnists address something that’s bothered me for some time. The United States of America is an enormous country, 300 million people, lots of resources, the most powerful nation on Earth and rich as heck, yet you can not buy a decent cup of coffee there for love or money.

I’ve spent more than two years in the US (mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area) – either living there or visiting – and I’ve never come close to anything half way palatable. I’ve tried the chains – Peets, Starbucks etc – and they’re appalling. I’ve tried five star restaurants, even five star restaurants specialising in Western European cuisine, and they consistently show a near total ignorance of how to make a cappuccino or a latte. Heck, when I was in Boston last month the first cappuccino I tried came in a large glass and the second with a straw!

The thing that’s particularly weird about the coffee thing is that the US is a crap country for coffee that thinks it’s a great country for coffee. There’s a constant chatter in the US media about how wonderful their coffee is, and how great their chainstores are. Everywhere you go – from groceries to bookstores – you can get coffee, but it’s always in foot high styrofoam cups with toffee and vanilla or some other crap. It mystifies me. Oh, and as if to confirm all of this, the newspaper columnist noted that Starbucks is being forced to close stores in Australia’s booming coffee market because of lack of sales. The only place they’re doing ok is at airports, where choice is limited and tourists abound.

So, my tip if you’re headed for the US is go, enjoy the wonderful people, the amazing sights and all of the nation’s many attractions, but don’t drink the coffee.

The year is slipping away and it’s looking less and less likely that Subterranean Press will get Howard Waldrop’s new collection Heart of Whitenesse into print for 2004, which is a little disappointing. I should probably add here that I’ve never heard of Subterranean dropping a book, so I’m sure it definitely will come out, but just probably next year some time. Oh well.

I am happy, though, to hear that Cemetery Dance is going to publish a new collection of stories by Terry Dowling, and that Small Beer are publishing Kelly Link’s second collection, Magic for Beginners, and a new Maureen McHugh collection. This year, 2004, has been a pretty outstanding year for collections in what seems to be a golden age (almost) for great collections (you need only look at Lucius Shepard’s Trujillo and Margo Lanagan’s Black Juice to see that), and 2005 looks set to be every bit as good.

A while back, may be a month ago, a friend emailed me to say that he’d heard Alex Irvine read a new short story at one of Ellen Datlow‘s KGB readings. It was, he assured me, about zombies and damn fine in the extreme.

Now, you simply can not get too many tips like this, so I promptly emailed Gordon over at F & SF, who assured me that the story was in hand, and would be in print before too long. Well, when I got the January issue of F & SF last week and it contained Alex’s story “The Lorelei” I thought that this must be it. I read it and it is a very fine story. It lacks for little, but what it does lack is zombies. At first I wondered if my source had been mistaken, but then I saw over on Alex’s website that he has another story, “The Golem of Detroit”, due out from F & SF shortly. This is a very cool thing and I await it with some anticipation. And it occurs to me that, considering there’s already one fine Irvine story in the magazine in ’05, and another one on the way, shouldn’t you have subscribed?

… Keith Miller is gone.

I’ve just started reading Gwyneth Jones’ new novel Life, which so far is very impressive. I also, just today, found out she had a blog. I know, of course, that all of you already knew about this, but just forgot to mention it, but still… Anyway, on her blog, Jones mentions she’s handed in Band of Gypsies, the fourth ‘Bold as Love’ novel. I thought the first book was brilliant, the second almost as good, and the third solid. I’m eager to see the fourth, and penultimate book, so I guess I’ll have to see if I can get one from the publisher. Wish me luck. Oh, and I’d add a congratulations to the guys at Night Shade for having the smarts to decide to publish Bold as Love in the US. It’s dynamite.